Tuesday, June 16, 2015

After Consulting with some of my Cinematographer Friends, i decided to Break the opening Shot in to 4-5 small Shots. here is first shot of them.

here i compose a 3d car with movement, Next i am going to add some trees in background and foreground and road under Car, also atmosphere like fog dirt etc, will post the shot again when more work done on it.

have a look how its going ....

If You have any suggestion on how i should go to this Shot Your suggestions are WELCOME.

you can tweet me on @pankajvfx or Use #SantulanFilm to give any Suggestion, i will be more then happy to answer them.

Saturday, June 6, 2015

These days i am doing research for my Short Film which i am planning to make some time soon.
Film has lots of VFX Shots in it, so i think it will interesting to share what i am doing, here is First WIP - Planning Stage.

Opening Shot
A car coming towards camera on a road in forest and moves over it, camera flips and we see back of car and Camera slowly goes up.

I am planing to achieve this shot by Technique called camera projection, where i am going to project real images on 3D geometry + animated 3D Car in it + compose some Character in car, then create a desire camera movement.

Lets see how it will come out.
Here is some Rough planning storyboard

Next i am going to make a motion graphics version of it with Some fog + 3d Camera movement,will share Here once some work will done on it.

Quick UpdateIf You have any suggestion on how i should go to this Shot Your suggestions are WELCOME.you can tweet me on @pankajvfx or Use #SantulanFilm to give any Suggestion, i will be more then happy to answer them.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Last week FXGuide put an excellent article on behind the scene of ‘God Only Knows’ - BBC Music
Fist watch the wonderful Promo

How do you bring together almost 30 famous musicians and have them sing – in a single place – a remake of The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’? That’s the task the BBC set itself to help launch BBC Music, with butterflies and bubbles and a Bengal tiger all thrown in for good measure. With skilled CG and compositing artistry The Mill helped construct the Francois Rousselet-directed promo, via Karmarama and Redbee Media, in just over eight weeks and with around 30 artists, combining footage of artists shot over a year into one location – Alexandra Palace – as well as crafting the digital elements. Visual effects supervisor/2D lead artist Hugo Guerra and fellow 2D lead artist Zoe Cassey-Hayes tell us how and we showcase a large collection of behind the scenes photos and video.

Planning the promo: “It was very complicated to organize and from a logistically point of view very challenging,” says Guerra. “We made a storyboard early on but because of artist availability we had to be very flexible with the story and sometimes decisions had to happen very close to the shoot days.

Filming approach: “The filming started in late 2013 with Sir Elton John and finished with David Grohl in the summer of 2014,” notes Guerra. “All in all I was on set 12 times for almost 1 year to film all the pieces of this huge puzzle. All the twenty-seven music stars were filmed on a green screen in several locations. We had to be very careful on set making sure everything was photographed and logged so we could replicate camera moves, lens info, lighting setups, matching scale and colour temperature. Both me, David Fleet (Joint Head of 3D) of and Luke Colson (EP) had many meetings with the DOPs, set designers and the director making sure everything was working since sometimes we filmed elements several months apart of each other.”

Alexandra Palace environments: Guerra: “The matte painting team lead by Can Y. Sanalan worked on creating the Alexandra Palace backdrops, as well as conceptualising and creating the final ethereal cloud scenes from scratch. We photographed thousands of photos onset of textures, HDRI’s and lighting references of Alexandre Palace to help the team create the backdrops. Most of them where then composited with the help of set extension and projection done in Flame and NUKE’s 3D systems.”

Lorde’s wings: “The CG wings were masterfully created and animated by our 3D artist Adam Droy,” says Cassey-Hayes. “First of all they had to be lit to match Lorde’s plate. When it came to the comp, however, we also wanted to create a bit of back lighting through the wings the help them feel a little lighter and transparent in the thinner areas around the bottom.”

How Brian Wilson met a tiger: “We built a huge forest set for Brian Wilson with NUKE’s 3D system using hundreds of 2D layers of leaves, forest parts, plants, etc all filmed onset after we finished filming Florence’s forest shots,” explains Guerra. “We used the same technique for Stevie Wonder.”

Kylie Minogue’s bubbles: “The bubbles were created in Maya by 3D artist Jules Janaud,” notes Cassey-Hayes. “We used images captured on set to create reflections and to help light the bubbles. However, this did not always give us the most beautiful look we were trying to achieve. We had to try numerous times to create bubbles that not only looked the part, but also felt like they were realistically within the scene they were composited into. Amongst reflections we wanted to create a petrol in water effect – which added colour and texture without obscuring our heroine Kylie sat within. She was put through the same refraction process that we would expect to see looking through a bubble to help bed her in.

Clouds and balloons: States Cassey-Hayes: “Our CG cloud lead was artist Adam Droy, who created them using Houdini. The were very unpredictable and difficult to control, so forward planning was imperative and we had to have concept drawings and layouts locked down early in the process to give us time to experiment with things like movement and density within the clouds. As we know all the artists were shot on green screen and making them look part of the environment was a task in itself. Careful painstaking compositing involving flares, colour correction and even cheating the lighting were all tricks we used to achieve this.

Using The Foundry’s HIERO: “It was a big part of the process, I used HIERO on every conform, VFX editorial task, client review and WIP generation during the entire production. Our R&D team has developed a very strong HIERO pipeline in The Mill so it was great to use it in this project, especially because of the fast way it can update the timeline with new versions.”